


study in scarlet

by arriviste



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Era, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-12
Updated: 2013-08-12
Packaged: 2017-12-23 03:26:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/921442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arriviste/pseuds/arriviste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s hardly Enjolras’s first time, but this police spy is the most inept tail he’s ever picked up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	study in scarlet

**Author's Note:**

> _"The reds, the reds!" retorted Bahorel. "A queer kind of fear, bourgeois. For my part I don't tremble before a poppy, the little red hat inspires me with no alarm. Take my advice, bourgeois, let's leave fear of the red to horned cattle."_
> 
> (Victor Hugo, _Les Miserables_ , 'The Child Is Amazed At The Old Man.')

It’s an afternoon when everyone’s busy. There's a list of appointed tasks and rendezvous; deliveries to printers, postings of bills, secret exchanges of weapons for sous, head-counting among the people. Enjolras is finished with his part already. Many of the others had further to go, or have necessarily taken circuitous routes back to the Musain; some, like Bahorel, never promised to check back in person at all but pleaded other assignations with a wink, and promised to send word.

For a little time, Enjolras has the room upstairs to himself to write, and to wait, under the faded map of France. He's making headway on his next draft when there's a step on the stair.

It's only Grantaire, looking a little unshaven, his dark hair too shaggy for fashion. He leans against the doorway and surveys the empty room, and his eyebrows rise to find Enjolras alone. His mouth begins to curve.

The small sound of disappointment that escapes Enjolras before he bends his head back to his work makes that curve disappear. Grantaire continues to lean against the door, elbow against the jamb, hip cocked, but the bravado of the pose takes on a sense of falsity.

“Back at the ink-pot, are we, ardent Narcissus? You’re more enraptured by the reflection of your mind put down upon paper than you are with anything in this fallen world of mortal flesh. Do you ever find your excessive self-love wearying? There's a cure for that, if you would pass from gathering narcissi to hyacinth.”

“I’m working,” Enjolras says, not bothering to look up from his page again. “Take your talk of flowers and find some shop girl to inconvenience with it.”

“I'd rather bother you.” When Enjolras doesn’t respond, Grantaire enlarges. “It amuses me more. It varies my palate as well as my palette. Shop girls, flower-sellers – you court them for a time and they are sweet, and then they find wealthier gentlemen who will be sweeter to them still, and then they're very sorry but they won't give you anything more from their gardens.”

“I am very sorry if yet another lady spurned your suit,” Enjolras says, with tolerable patience. “Don’t press it with me.”

“I was wrong before. You're a handful of stinging nettles, not a bouquet of jonquils. If only nettles had their insolent yellow heads! The metaphor would be perfect.”

Enjolras stays forebodingly silent. He dips his pen in ink, and his words on the paper firm from a whisper of grey into a more pleasing and resolute black. He should have refilled his pen a moment earlier, but Grantaire was watching – is still watching – and Enjolras didn’t want to encourage more verbiage by drawing Grantaire’s attention to it as an object again.

“O forgotten and abandoned fleshpot of Egypt,” Grantaire says, renewing his addresses to the inkstand. Grantaire is a creature of habit, predictable in everything; there’s a reason Enjolras is done with listening to him. “What price the flesh, when we have ink? The _lieu de plaisir_ if not the _lieu de débauche_ , the _antre du péché_ or _antre du vice_ , at least _la bonne chère_? What price the honey-pots of the Seine? Enjolras, you ignore my questions – I accept that, I hardly expect you to be in a position to provide either a knowledgeable sum or a mien _aux anges_ when contemplating such delights – but a small acknowledgment that I’m speaking to you, is that too much to ask? Are we beyond the point where you blush for my follies?”

“If I ever blushed at your words,” Enjolras says – he doesn't think he did; when he first met Grantaire his speeches were too impenetrable to make Enjolras see his point, and when later his point was clear, Enjolras could not take his fractured references and rhetoric seriously enough to respond at all – “It would have only been a charitable act, to show shame for you when you are past showing any for yourself.”

For a moment Grantaire looks like he might be the one to flush. Then he essays another of his crooked smiles. “And I’ll flee before that show of colour like the matador?” He waves his clutched hat a little, a flick of his wrist back and forth. 

It's red, and the gesture gives Enjolras an image for the pamphlet. Irritably, he waves Grantaire and his hat away and returns to his drafting.

Grantaire takes up a chair and a bottle and is quiet for some time. Enjolras continues both to write and to ignore him, and then the words take over and neither is a conscious act anymore. 

It's surprisingly easy to set him aside. It's a new thing in Enjolras's experience, a Grantaire who doesn't bluster and banter but sits quietly, lets him breathe and think, lets him wrestle through metaphysical concepts to find the clear simple words he needs to communicate with the people that have almost forgotten Danton.

Periodically, one friend and then another returns to report. Enjolras collects a stack of papers beside his elbow to burn after reading. Some are sealed, some not. 

Bossuet returns empty-handed with a tale of being followed by potential police spies – 

“And therefore I swallowed it,” he says, and Enjolras is reminded of Grantaire’s presence by the faint hiccup of mirth from the corner.

“Well done,” Enjolras says, “but did you _read_ it first?”

The pride on Bossuet’s face dims. “Um.” He smiles hopefully. “No, but I held it on my tongue the length of three streets – the ink has probably transferred itself to the roof of my mouth, like a sailor’s tattoo.”

“Oh, such material,” Grantaire says, hiccupping again. “I am breathless.”

“Wordless, rather,” Enjolras suggests.

Bossuet is made to stand in disgrace by the fire until Joly returns, the slit lining of his coat lumpy with smuggled objects, and takes out his diagnostic mirror to examine him. 

“Red,” he says at last. “Red and ridged, and I see no black: if any ink came off the paper, you doubtless cleaned it away with your tongue.” 

Another hiccup of mirth from the corner.

“You should eat a hearty meal tonight,” Joly adds. “The iron salts in the ink will put your humours out of balance.”

“Also, Joly, the paper,” Grantaire says, abandoning silence. “What will that wad of rag-pulp do to his alimentary system?”

Like Enjolras, Joly knows Grantaire well enough to detect the mockery in the apparent concern. “Ha,” he says, taking the jest on its face. He tucks his mirror into his breast pocket with an air of finality. 

Then indecision crosses his features and he turns back to Bossuet. 

“Unbutton your waistcoat and let me palpate your organs–”

It ends, of course, in Joly running anxious hands over Bossuet’s chest and abdomen as Grantaire laughs and Bossuet feigns agony – “A blockage, Joly, do you feel it?” – and Enjolras abruptly tiring of the play.

“ _Out_ ,” he says. “We meet again on Saturday at eleven. If you’re leaving together, take care you’re not followed home. You may need to take different routes.”

Joly straightens, but Bossuet pretends to take offense. “You dismiss me like a dog? When I’m dying for the cause at this very moment?” He puts a hand to his stomach. “I ate my words for you without the aid of bread and butter, Enjolras; would any other man do as much?”

“Do you want to make that dare?” Grantaire asks. “I would drink his bathwater.”

“What wouldn’t you drink?” Joly says with fond but cruel accuracy, and catches Bossuet by the arm. A clatter on the stairs, and they’re gone.

Enjolras's pen scratches in the new-born silence.

“Shall I go, too?” Grantaire asks.

His first bottle of wine is almost gone. There is a second unopened on the table. In another man Enjolras would begin to fear belligerent debauchery, but Grantaire is barely beginning. Wind him up and he might unravel into mayhem; leave him quiet and he may soothe and settle like a fractious child into sleep. 

“Are you my man?” Enjolras asks in answer. He doesn't mean to be unduly cruel, but it's a simple process of logic. “Serving the Friends today, following my orders?”

A pause. Grantaire rests his cheek on his folded arms and regards his empty glass sadly. “No.”

“No,” Enjolras agrees. The affair with the dominos rises up between them; it has been there since Grantaire first entered, a phantom unaddressed.

Enjolras is not angry with him, precisely. To be disappointed, one has to have had true expectations in the first place. If Enjolras is angry it's on behalf of the dropped banner, the missed chance with the sculptors. For Grantaire himself he feels barely a pin-prick of personal anger or regret, added to the usual frustration he engenders in Enjolras like breathing.

Grantaire seems to feel the prick of neither, although he disappeared from their company for almost a week. If and when he returned, Enjolras had expected him to be chastened; but in the past few days, he's turned up again and again, resumed attending meetings and not-meetings and general gatherings and suppers like usual, hanging on their friends. If shame's invisible lash touches him at all, it seems to show only in driving him more deeply to the wine-bottle and in consigning himself more heavily into the arms of Morpheus after that.

“You don't take my orders. What would be the point of addressing you with them?”

“Light breaks,” Grantaire says. “No; it is only my nettle's lovely head. May I stay, then?”

“If you can be quiet again, I don't particularly care.”

“I am content with that,” Grantaire says, and applies himself to filling his glass again.

Enjolras works. He reads; he burns. He makes notes. A child delivers messages from Bahorel and another brings word from Feuilly. Courfeyrac appears at last, out of breath.

“All done,” he says, reaching into his coat. He passes Enjolras a packet of paper still warm from his body. “Combeferre's is there, too; the streets are busy tonight. I sent him home. The Latin Quarter's being watched less closely than the rue Verrerie. I have no idea how _I'm_ getting home safely.” His hair is tousled and his merry dark eyes are alight; he smells like gunpowder. His hand on Enjolras's shoulder squeezes with a convulsive sort of excitement.

Grantaire clinks his glass against his bottle as if to applaud. “What a kingly sort of spider Enjolras makes, sitting at the middle of his web while you workers bring him fat flies.”

Enjolras throws him a severe glance, which Grantaire ignores, and Courfeyrac startles. 

“I didn't see you there, Capital R. What a haunt for you, when everything's happening out there! You should see Paris tonight; the place is humming.”

“Maybe I wanted to be quiet for an evening,” Grantaire suggests, and makes a face when the suggestion sends Courfeyrac into a peal of laughter. “It could be.”

“Never,” Courfeyrac says with great authority. “That doesn't matter; it's convenient for me that you're here. I have a horrible feeling I was followed at least as far as the Latin, although I did my best to shake them – God, you should have seen, I cut through a few alleys and backyards – anyway, I need to lose my tail somewhere nice and crowded. A man can't loiter alone; he looks terribly suspicious. I was planning to strong-arm this monument of virtue here into having a bite of supper with me and acting as my company – you'll do _much_ better. Enjolras can't saunter, he hasn't the knack.”

“Whereas I lurch from wall to wall, looking to be held up?”

“Precisely. You mastered the saunter, and proceeded to the sprawl.”

“Still,” Grantaire says. “Three is better than two, surely.”

The suggestion makes Courfeyrac laugh again. “Certainly, they will never expect it.”

No public revolutionary meeting is ever bigger than it needs to be: if it can be divided down to two, it is two. Enjolras doesn't need to argue this obviousness. He continues to write.

“You have a point,” Courfeyrac continues, and Enjolras's pen stutters in its flow before resuming. “And it will ease my conscience; I told Combeferre I'd make sure Enjolras ate, and despite my best entreating, lovely Louison wouldn't give me so much as a heel of bread on my way up.”

“Turn your entreaties to a more adamant object,” Grantaire suggests.

“Adamant object,” Courfeyrac says, and puts his hand back on Enjolras’s shoulder.

“ _No_ ,” Enjolras says, in the tone of voice he can confidently expect to be obeyed.

-

The Palais-Royal is full of light and sound and humanity; if Enjolras had deliberately set himself to take the city's pulse at its thickest artery, where it beats hardest and lives most furiously, he would have come here.

Of course, he hasn't.

The complex has only become more Byzantine in recent years: the closed palace and the open gardens, the hundreds of boutiques and salons and cafes and stalls, the covered arcades of the Galeries d'Orléans. One can stroll and shop in every sort of weather: it was Louis-Philippe's great gift to the people even before he declared himself to be their king.

“I loathe this place,” Enjolras tells Courfeyrac, who pats his arm consolingly.

“You can call it the Palais de l'Égalité like a Conventioner if it makes you feel any better. Come, we are going to eat–”

“And to drink,” Grantaire suggests, from Courfeyrac's other side, sauntering with a will. 

Enjolras doesn't answer that. He doesn't want in any way to lend credence to the appearance that he is engaged to dine with Grantaire out of choice. He is accompanying Courfeyrac, and that on republican business; in the heaving throng of humanity which is the Palais-Royal, exploding in the evening instead of dying away, Courfeyrac can appear to sup with careless ease, without a thought in his head of anything but his next examination and his latest girl, and then melt into the night. After he's clear, Enjolras will make his own subtle exit. It is an operation to which Grantaire's presence provides an additional blind, but it's a galling one.

“I think not,” Courfeyrac says, and steers Grantaire onto a slightly straighter course. “Look, we'll take a table at that café. Give your best impression of carefree students enjoying the evening. Don't get into an argument with anyone. No impromptu speeches.”

“How will I restrain myself?” Enjolras asks his retreating back dryly, but turned over in his head, the idea pleases him. 

The café is half inside and half out, tables spilling onto the avenue, shaded by plane trees and lit by the tea-rose sky of dusk. Candles and lanterns are already out everywhere. It can't have looked very different forty years ago, when these grounds – when one of these cafés – served as the birthplace of liberty as well as the Orléans.

Grantaire is seated already, and apparently devotedly studying a lady seated at a nearby table. Enjolras takes a chair, still thoughtful.

Forty years ago, could anyone sitting here have imagined how soon their swelling unrest would be harnessed to action? Was the spark to tinder of the right speech all that was necessary? Soon, he needs to bring the same thing about himself, seize the busy thousands in his hands and shape them into a weapon – 

“You're pretending you're Desmoulins, about to make his move,” Grantaire observes, catching his train of thought like a cough. His eyes have left the lady and fixed themselves disconcertingly on Enjolras. “Don't leap up on the table and follow his example, you'll get us thrown out. I don't know that this delicate thing could take your weight, anyway. The days of '89 saw not only giants among men, but sturdy trestle-tables among spindly boudoir pieces. Think how embarrassing it would be if you attempted to climb to heaven, only to fall to pavement.”

“I'm not going to make a speech,” Enjolras says. He's not an idiot. The next revolution won't begin in the Palais-Royal even if the first one did. The times are too different. The bourgeois exist now like a spreading layer of insulating fat between the aristocracy and the poor, suffocating the sparks of rebellion.

“You'd make a fine Desmoulins, though. A bare-headed Gabriel in our midst, bearing the word and the lily.” Grantaire's eyelids lower a little and he leans closer. “Have you a pistol? You'd need one, at least, to draw attention. How did the cry go? 'Louis has sent for his Germans, his Austrians, his Swiss; they surround Paris like a noose of steel! Rise up!'”

“Rise up,” Enjolras echoes. The vision is seductive enough – past and future together – that he doesn't draw back from Grantaire's closeness. He can imagine the scene of forty years ago: he can imagine the scene taking place tomorrow. Soon. Grantaire has a good voice for telling it. “Rise up, and follow me.”

“And then he assaulted an innocent tree like one of the ones before us – perhaps the very same – and tore a leaf from it and waved it like a banner. ‘Green for hope! Green for love!’”

“Green for the future,” Enjolras says, not so much correcting as supplementing. “Green for liberty.”

“Green for my waistcoat,” Grantaire says. It breaks the thread.

“Can’t you ever be serious?”

“Never,” Grantaire says. “Besides, it _is_ green.”

“If you would be serious about anything, be serious about this,” Enjolras says. He makes a slight gesture of his head at the people around them, the great flow of the crowd. “You may not be willing to fight for them, or even to do a little talking for their sakes, but don’t make light of what we’re trying to bring about.”

Grantaire grimaces. His eye passes obediently over the masses, but doesn’t linger on any particular heads. _What an object for your labours,_ his furled mouth seems to say. It indicts busy shopkeepers and strutting bankers with their taffeta-heavy wives, pulls at the sight of _gamin_ ghosting at their heels, finds a little strange pity for _inamorata_ laying hands on the arms of promising gentlemen.

“I make light of everything; but not my waistcoat. It’s not the fresh young green of revolution, but the sombre green of despair. The green of the bottle, passed through fear and doubt. A very different colour from the grass that will grow on your graves.”

He turns his head to regard Enjolras directly again. His brows arch suggestively, but under them the blue eyes are oddly serious, the red mouth half-curved. There's the usual bitterness and detached amusement, the lens through which Grantaire studies everything; under that, a flicker of genuine feeling, muffled and already made self-conscious by the former.

Enjolras doesn’t know how he’s supposed to answer that challenge. He’s not afraid of dying, if it will bring a better and brighter future. Desmoulins died. Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just. None of them made forty: Saint-Just didn’t make thirty. What he fears is what they did, leaving the work undone. 

He could say, I am not afraid of death, and it would be true, but it wouldn’t alter Grantaire’s expression a fraction. That perspective is not one Grantaire can enter into.

“If I was an observer,” Enjolras says instead, in a vernacular that will be understood, “I might take you for a revolutionary. I wouldn’t quibble over the shade of your waistcoat. Your red hat is almost a cap. I could make a Phrygian out of it, if I wanted to terrify the meek and electrify the wild.”

Grantaire laughs. His attention is back on the crowd. “Pin a cockade to it and call me yours?”

“What a thought.” Enjolras opens his hand to consign it to the abyss. “I simply point out that your clothes make associations that your mouth belies.”

“How strange of them,” Grantaire says, laughter slowly dying. He keeps his eye on an elderly couple strolling through the Palais. “Well, you know I have a Robespierre in my closet. If I ever sport the _tricolore,_ you can call it my heart.”

“On your sleeve?” 

“On my breast.”

“Don’t talk to me of your Robespierres,” Enjolras says, belatedly corrective. It’s too easy to be drawn into a pattern of dialogue with Grantaire; back and forth, away from the straightest line, from all seriousness and grounding. Grantaire’s conversation is a maze, turning one around and making him dizzy; a mire, pulling him under.

Grantaire laughs again, less mirthfully.

“Oh, don’t worry. I burned it. Better an offering to Mars than a mockery sported by Hephaestus.” 

“Vulcan at least was a worker. Do you compare yourself –”

“No, no,” Grantaire soothes. “To Hephaestion only, and therefore only in –”

“Coffee,” Courfeyrac says, with a neat and pretty girl behind him. His head is quirked, and the two cups of Turkish coffee he carries are small and give off steam even in the May air. He puts them down between them, carefully, and the girl puts down another pair.

Enjolras eyes Courfeyrac as askance as Courfeyrac is eyeing him. Grantaire smiles at the girl, who plays with a flounce on her skirt. 

“Didn’t I tell you?” Courfeyrac says gaily, addressing her. “Handsome, yes, but this is the face that turned Greek heroes into stone.” To Enjolras: “Don’t worry, Medusa! Supper is ordered, but we won’t tarry for it. We will toast you over our witches-brew, and then depart. I have shed you; your presence is no longer required. This lady, a friend of mine who I will not introduce, to spare your blushes, has engaged me to dine with her instead, and thence to the safer harbour of her lodging. A much better and a much fairer shield against suspicion.”

“You render my presence pointless, then,” Enjolras says with reproach, rising, and Courfeyrac stays him with a hand on his arm and a grave undertone.

“No – there’s nothing else you can do for the revolution tonight. Eat, for its sake, and for mine, and for Combeferre's. Look at the people you hold at a distance from yourself, and remember that they are our object.”

“A poor one,” Grantaire says, ironic.

“The poorer, the nobler,” Enjolras says, fierce.

“Er,” the girl says, looking between the three of them in a confused sort of triangulation. There's a question in her eyes, and Courfeyrac slides over the lingering problem of introductions – names are dangerous – and throws himself into charming her with a recounting of his recent adventures, the point and purpose of their labour somewhat obscured, playing up the daringness of his escape and the perils that he faced down. 

Enjolras doesn't listen, but stirs his coffee. Black dregs rise up from the bottom. They give the liquid its force; the sugar is what makes the whole beverage palatable. When it cools enough to drink, it’s rich and bittersweet on his tongue, the conflicted spirit that gave birth to the Enlightenment, and he forbears being annoyed with Courfeyrac (mildly) and by Grantaire (unendingly) long enough to truly taste it. 

People pass by. Young, old, middle-aged; married, single, searching. Rich and poor. The Palais-Royal is a true melting-pot where all the gold and dross metals of the city mingle, and separating them is a strange alchemic art Enjolras needs to master. He doesn’t have much time left. May wanes. June beckons. The dog days of July that shone so brightly two years ago press on him, a deadline. No revolutions are made in winter. 

Soon.

The girl finishes her coffee and tilts her head.

“My cue,” Courfeyrac says, rising, and his own cup clinks in echo against its saucer. “I have paid for your dinners, for your trouble.” He offers her his arm. “Capital R – I could wish you had dressed a little more moderately. This is a bad time to wear those colours together.”

Grantaire leans back in his chair. “I didn’t think about it.”

“Of course you didn't,” Courfeyrac says with affection, and pats his head in farewell. 

Enjolras finishes with his coffee. When Courfeyrac and his unknown lady are out of sight, he starts to get up.

“Don’t.”

Enjolras frowns. “Do I need to see this farce through? I’ll stop for something on my way home. Have my share.”

Grantaire stares back at him, unusually serious. “You have been watching the people _en masse_ ,” he says. “I’ve been watching our fellow diners. Moreover, I’ve been watching that man in the corner with the cap pulled low over his eyes. He was very interested in Courfeyrac – or his lady – but he hasn’t followed them.”

“Many people are interested in ladies,” Enjolras says. “Many are even interested in Courfeyrac, for whatever reason. Do you truly think–”

“Your yellow head is not exactly inconspicuous,” Grantaire says. “I would lend you my hat, but it would only heighten the problem. Do I suspect Courfeyrac's spy has attached himself to us, like a flea jumping dogs? I do, but only watching and waiting can tell.”

“You are not your best envoy; your motives are suspect.”

Grantaire glances away, and then back at him, sharper. “If I had them, I would conceal them. What I do not bother to conceal is what I do not care about being known; because I know there is no hope and therefore no harm. Stay seated, and let us watch this man a little longer.”

They stay seated. Dinner, on Courfeyrac's charge, finds them late in the bustling business of the café, and is scarcely worth the fee they are not paying; indifferent oysters, followed by even more indifferent mutton, for which under his breath Grantaire blames the British. They do not otherwise talk, except of table-related matters – “The salt?” “Oui, et le poivre.” This oyster a good one, this a poor.

There's a pall cast by both their imagined watcher and that last bare turn of phrase: Grantaire's confession with its elastic circumflex that manages to both slam the thing said down on the table between them with one hand, and snatch it away and bundle it into brown paper with the other, saying 'did I say that?'

It's how Grantaire always says things: more openly than anyone else would, but making mockery of his own sincerity at the very moment of speaking. Ignoring Grantaire in his flights has become Enjolras's habit, one all the Friends have followed, and in consequence Grantaire's pronouncements have become both more open and more mockingly insincere. Or more sincere and therefore more mocking? To this day, Enjolras can't tell. 

Enjolras doesn't judge people by their words, but by their actions. Grantaire's actions do not convey seriousness. He may keep a red waistcoat in his closet, but he wears it only to play dress-up, and fails even in that; he knows all the patter of their cause, but doesn't believe a word, or offer it where it's wanted. He claims an admiration for Enjolras's character that lends itself to his person, but he mocks the purpose that has formed his character. Seriousness in either enterprise would require more answer than feigned deafness and deliberate ignorance, but it is unlikely Enjolras will ever have to change his response.

The man in the cap continues to slump in his chair and drink coffee, and doesn’t move, even after the bric-a-brac of their meal and his are cleared away in dour post-prandial silence. 

“We could order a bottle of wine and wait him out,” Grantaire suggests. 

“I hardly think so,” Enjolras says. “We will leave. Either he follows us or he doesn’t.”

“What will you do if he follows?”

Enjolras has been careful and circumscribed lately with his entrances and exits. His height and his hair mark him out. They have reason to shadow him, but not yet anything to arrest him for – nothing they can prove, anyway. He doesn't want to lead them back to his latest lodgings, which so far are unwatched.

“He may not follow at all,” he says, and pushes back his chair. “If he does – I’ll come to it. Come; we’ll follow Courfeyrac’s original agenda.”

“Sauntering?”

“Separating.”

Grantaire raises his eyebrows, but they leave the café and start down the rue de Monpensier. At first Enjolras thinks they have been worried for nothing, or perhaps that Grantaire truly had engineered his fear for the purpose of pressing his company; then it becomes clear that as they turn the corner that they are, in fact, being followed.

It’s hardly Enjolras’s first time, but it’s the most inept tail he’s ever picked up. 

He mutters as much under his breath, and Grantaire laughs.

“Yes, the incompetence of the spy is our major concern.” He plucks at Enjolras’s sleeve, and gestures out at the gardens. “Stop to survey the flowers, swift-moving Helios. Your long legs carry us away too fast. Linger. Look disinterested. We are students, and in Paris, and we don’t have a political thought in our heads; life is too full of other distractions.”

“You don’t need to act at all, then,” Enjolras says, but he slows. 

Grantaire claps one hand to his waistcoat and staggers. “Pierced, punctured, mortally wounded – do you think he’s marking you or me? Your hair, of course, but my hat –”

“At some point you will realise there is more to republicanism than dress.” 

“Another blow,” Grantaire remarks. "The patient is not expected to survive.”

They walk. They’re followed. They enter a shop; they’re followed again when they exit. The grand storefronts begin to decline. When they turn another corner, and another, they’re in the wooden maze of the galleries, the seedier area still under the Orléans aegis where less respectable importuners make bolder approaches to passers-by.

“Ah,” Grantaire says. “These flowers, Enjolras – will you gather them or leave them to me?” 

That doesn’t even deserve a response; Enjolras doesn’t give one, and Grantaire hums under his breath.

_Dans ce jardin on ne rencontre_  
 _Ni champs, ni prés, ni bois, ni fleurs._  
 _Et si l'on y dérègle ses mœurs,_  
 _Au moins on y règle sa montre._

He smiles at one woman, and then another, and when a third approaches them he tilts his head with apparent delight. “Hello, demoiselle.”

“Grantaire,” Enjolras says. He’d hiss it, if the name had any sibilants.

It’s Grantaire’s turn to ignore him, and he banters and barters with the woman like Enjolras isn’t there at all, ascertaining that she has a room at a nearby lodging-house, and yes, he may follow her; the price must be paid first, and to the man who runs the lodging-house? No, Grantaire doesn’t need to pay him, too; merely to buy some of his wine, which is very bad, but still palatable.

“Too high,” Grantaire says with apparent regret, “and my palate is too particular.” Another woman enters the discussion, and then there’s a crowd.

When Enjolras glances over their heads he can still make out the shape of their pursuer, lurking in the growing dark. When he tunes back into Grantaire’s increasingly esoteric conversation, it’s to hear Grantaire apologetically informing his clutch of ladies that no, in fact, he’s not looking for a woman for himself, but for his friend, a perennial late-bloomer, untouched as first snowfall – 

“ _Grantaire_.”

“He’s shy,” Grantaire confides. “Look at him blush.” 

The women agree with him that the effect is charming, and the reverse-auction becomes fervent. Grantaire encourages the bidding by enlarging upon Enjolras's meek, lamb-like nature and sweetly bashful airs.

“When I have you alone–”

“You’ll put your boot on my throat, I know,” Grantaire agrees. His lower lip disappears between his teeth. “I’ll take my punishment; but our shadow has not abated. If we were to go with one of these lovely ladies to their room – I know the very proposition is –”

“You want to share?” one of the women asks. She doesn’t seem like it’s a very unusual request. “To provide an example for your friend, or to instruct him in the art?” 

Enjolras is not blushing.

“No,” he says sharply. “Grantaire, come on. We have our own appointments to keep.”

Grantaire looks like he wants to argue, but when Enjolras glares at him he holds up his hands, yielding. “Ah, you see,” he says to the women. “I am instructed.”

“Your friend has a particular palate, too?” the first woman says. “I know the sort. If you seek it, I can make your introductions.”

“No, no, I can do that well enough myself,” Grantaire assures her. When Enjolras pulls at his cuff, he tugs on the brim of his hat in farewell and lets himself be led.

They walk in silence. The shadow follows. 

“Your pardon,” Grantaire says, when they’ve passed out of earshot. “I didn’t mean to take undue liberties with your name.”

“How is that any different from the liberties you take in your usual conversation?”

“Well, normally I don’t try to sell you to the street?” Grantaire offers. His mouth does something helpless and contorted. “And I don’t usually mean – I would never truly –”

Enjolras shrugs, mastering irritation and embarrassment. There isn't time for it. He takes the direction the woman indicated, as much because he doesn’t know where else to go as for distraction. These streets twist like a warren and are as full of exits elsewhere as a sieve, but people cling to the walls everywhere, and each promised glint of light requires passing through a gauntlet.

More people make approaches as they pass, and are brushed away.

He notes without making external comment that their composition is changing; several are clearly male under their paint, and some are just as clearly men with neither paint or skirts. Their shadow begins to keep a longer distance.

“I can’t see any way out but on or back,” Grantaire says at last. They’re walking close together, and their words are breath on the air. “We need to find our way to the square again, and part. One of us will at least be free of him for certain, and the other–”

“I have had a better thought,” Enjolras cuts in. He may still be holding onto some of his mortified vexation from before; certainly, some imp of the perverse prompts him. “It’s not only republicans who have reason for discretion. He grows less eager the further we’ve gone. He slackens as he begins to suspect our purpose to be in earnest. Give him proof, and he may go.”

Grantaire is silent. If his features have altered, it’s no longer light enough to see them; light has become sparer and sparer as they abandoned the Palais's main arteries for the less salubrious corpuscles clustering around its exits. Silence is not what Enjolras had expected from him. “It’s not only republicans who can be arrested.” 

“Certain expressions of republicanism are illegal. What he suspects is not, and particularly not on these grounds.”

“You would use disgust as a weapon?”

“I use everything.”

“Oh, I know,” Grantaire says, returning to something like his usual conversational flow. “All fuel to the pure flame. Less pure for contracting an alliance with one of these _complaisants_ , however, or are you proposing me for the part? I suppose I could play at _anti-physique_ with one of them, if called to it.”

“Stop rattling,” Enjolras says. “I don’t suggest anything of the sort – simply show.”

“Still,” Grantaire pursues. “Would you have me handle the contraction? By all means, let us keep your hands clean.”

“I would have you handle – that is, to pretend,” Enjolras says, with difficulty. He may be colouring, but the dark will hide it. “With me.”

Grantaire is unnaturally mute again before he answers. 

“In the _street_?”

“Is that how it’s done?”

“What do you think I – God! Look around you, and be instructed,” Grantaire suggests, wobbling between extremes of incredulity. Enjolras presses his lips together, and declines to obey. He’s been trying not to notice anything in particular. “The street; the gardens; the banks of the Seine. Not always, of course; like with women, one can find a companion and remove to a room for greater leisure – or so I imagine. That’s what I had in mind before, with the woman, but then I realised such an end wouldn’t help us; he seems truly determined, and would only follow.” 

“The street,” Enjolras says. “Or rather, the wall?”

“You've appointed yourself the master of ceremonies; instruct me.”

“I am master of nothing,” Enjolras points out, holding to his own evenness. “What was the expression you used before? Untouched as first snowfall?”

“God,” Grantaire says, in apostrophe again. “I did. Yes, the wall.” His breath is a hesitation. “I may need to touch you.”

“I think you necessarily will.”

“I mean,” Grantaire perseveres. “Not unduly, but – Are you set on making this scene?”

“I don’t propose things I don’t mean. If you must touch me a little, in show,” Enjolras adds, “I truly don't care.” He means it in much the same way as he did earlier, when Grantaire asked to stay in his company while he wrote.

Grantaire takes it the same. “Of course,” he says, with another exhale. “I am nothing, after all.” 

“A shield,” Enjolras contradicts him. They don't time for Grantaire’s usual line in outrageous self-abasement; besides, he hasn’t consumed enough wine tonight to excuse it. “What did Courfeyrac call me – a Gorgon? I would put you between me and this man; you can refract me, and thereby freeze him.”

“How useful of me,” Grantaire remarks. “Very well; find a wall.”

A clear patch is difficult to find. Wordlessly, Enjolras makes one. People draw back from them as he approaches, and move aside when he sets his back against it. 

“Oh, you _are_ untutored,” Grantaire says. “It’s normally the other way about.” 

Against the wall, Enjolras bites his lip. He prefers to see things coming. “That seems illogical, not to say unequal.”

Grantaire shrugs. “I don’t mind if you like it better like this.” Then he steps forward, and he’s in Enjolras’s space, and close enough that their bodies are brushing. “It will make a better show.” His lips are at Enjolras’s ear now, and it makes their furtive conversation easier.

The spy probably thinks they’re whispering whatever people whisper when they couple. Enjolras puts a hand to Grantaire’s shoulder, and feels the muscle shiver through the fabric of his shirt. 

Grantaire hesitates a moment, and then returns the gesture. His hand slides, by slow degrees, down the slope of Enjolras’s arm. His other hand finds the wall, more surely, and supports the forward-lean of his body. Between them Enjolras is fenced and hidden, only his bright hair evident.

Grantaire's hand leaves his elbow and hovers at his hip. He makes too much fuss about what is mere flesh-machinery. “Still?”

“I told you,” Enjolras says with impatience. When Grantaire continues to hover, he shifts a little, sliding down the wall. 

It brings them closer together, evening out their heights. Grantaire touches his hip, and when Enjolras doesn’t cringe, sets his hand between them like a shield, the sword in the bed between Lancelot and his lady. 

At the brush of Grantaire’s knuckles, as stiff and impersonal as they are, a throb of sexual reaction touches Enjolras slightly, and he grimaces. He doesn’t have a strong sensual nature, fortunately, and his body troubles him little. He generally avoids or ignores anything that would disturb it. 

“Sorry,” Grantaire mutters. His arm jerks; his hand keeps as distant as it can as he cups himself and pretends to rock his hips. 

“I told you,” Enjolras mutters back, with more impatience still. From any perspective but theirs, they must seem to press together, Grantaire's hand working with some purpose between them. Under his breath Grantaire still continues to whisper _sorry, sorry,_ and Enjolras gives up on correcting him. “How long?” 

“You need me to answer that for you, too?”

“I don't know if it's different–”

“Much the same,” Grantaire says, “depending. Long enough not to shame me before everyone watching, anyway.” A particularly verisimilitudinous thrust grinds his knuckles against Enjolras's groin again. “Sorry – Oh.” A swallow. "It seems you are not quite made of stone."

“Continue,” Enjolras says; “or is that your usual length?”

“Ha.” This time the graze of Grantaire's knuckles is deliberate, seeking, and when he finds what he's looking for he doesn't apologise; he presses. His voice becomes something coaxing. "Enjolras–”

“Don't trouble yourself.”

“I would, if you would.” A pause. Enjolras shakes his head, denying. “Let me attend to you? Allow that much.”

“You make it seem a favour–”

“It would be.”

“Do you deserve favours?”

“No, of course not,” Grantaire says, more crisply. “Very well; call it my price.”

“Now you would make me out a whore–”

“Narcissus. My lily-flower.” Grantaire hums his silly tune low in his throat, and Enjolras arches into his hand without quite meaning to. “Who gives it up in the street for coffee and a good dinner. No – if there's a whore here, it's me.”

“Shut your mouth,” Enjolras says, crisp himself. Grantaire's breath is scalding his neck; his idling hand is busy drawing every prick of feeling Enjolras possesses into it. He has no will to move away. “Put your head on my shoulder. It will seem like we embrace.”

“We do embrace." 

That truth Enjolras would rather not face. It disturbs him how much his body yearns for Grantaire's closeness. Not simply intimately, but everywhere. He rests his own head against Grantaire's shoulder and avoids answering, and Grantaire takes that for the consent to go further which it is. He works between them on the buttons at Enjolras' hip. 

Then his hand moves on Enjolras, skin against skin, and Enjolras closes his eyes. He is not here; he is marble. His ears, however, continue to function, close companion to Grantaire's mouth.

Grantaire talks. That is predictable. “Have you ever taken the time to walk through the Louvre? Not the Greco-Roman rooms, nor the Davids – do you admit Géricault to your limited circle? – but the medieval rooms.”

Enjolras breathes through his nose as Grantaire wanders off-track, weighing up Géricault's merits against the arguments of an imaginary Enjolras. His hand, however, stays single-minded, and Enjolras wonders, despite the dark, if he opened his eyes - what does Grantaire look like, with his hand on Enjolras’s prick and art on his lips?

“You should see the icons," Grantaire adds, completing his eccentric orbit. "Mournful things, with long noses and disapproving dark eyes, and haloes made of the thinnest beaten gold. Radiantly bright, holy, pure; but age and ill-handling is starting to tell, and their gold leaf begins to fall away.” 

Something pierces through him - the invocation of judgemental eyes, the thought of surreptitious audience, Grantaire’s lips moving from his ear to press briefly against his hair before returning –

“Underneath the gilding, they’re red,” Grantaire whispers, like a secret, and Enjolras shudders helplessly. His hips spasm, his very core seems to seize, and he spends in the cradle of Grantaire’s palm.

Silence follows, and then shame comes crashing in its wake, a swell of it as inexorable as the first paroxysm.

Putting his trousers back in order, Enjolras is grateful for the way Grantaire remains an unyielding arch over him with his weight still on one arm against the wall; irritated by the way Grantaire watches him while he does it.

“ _La tristesse_ ,” Grantaire remarks, observing. His voice is as composed as ever, but his features are not. “Shall I tell you that you are red and ridged, like the roof of Lesgles' mouth, but bear no trace of black? No smut adheres to you.”

“Are we still watched?”

“We are unquestionably being watched. Are we still attended? No, I don’t think so – only our exit will tell, but he seems to have dissolved into his shadows.”

“We should leave.”

“A moment.” Grantaire glances down between them. For that moment Enjolras can’t imagine what he’s looking at, and then he recollects the aftermath of his spending, and enters into Grantaire’s confusion. “Will you think badly of me if –”

“Whatever you must.” 

Enjolras expects - the wall, the street. A smear against the cloth of Grantaire’s thigh or shirt, his own. He does not expect Grantaire to wipe his hand carefully against the wooden railing and then clean it more thoughtfully still with his tongue. 

“I can’t bear it to be wasted,” Grantaire says, in apparent exculpation. His mouth has furled again, and Enjolras looks at it with a transfixed horror that its more outrageous utterances only rarely achieve. “It spawns no flowers, it sows no fields.” 

“I think you truly _would_ drink my bathwater,” Enjolras says, shuddering again, and puts Grantaire away from him. 

That leaves him obvious to the back-gallery, and he has to consciously square his shoulders as he strides along, looking ahead, and neither left or right. He keeps his chin tucked low and his face averted. There are murmurs, cat-calls, offers. Enjolras doesn’t bother to make sense of them.

He makes it almost clear of the warren before Grantaire is caught up to his side. The growing light makes it impossible for Enjolras to turn his head and greet him.

“We’re not followed."

Enjolras nods his agreement. He hasn't observed any trace of their shadow.

They walk in silence. There’s no need now to pretend to be sauntering. Shop-fronts pass unheeded, bookshops go unparsed, chocolate stalls untroubled. Grantaire doesn’t even stir himself to tip his hat or flirt with a flower-seller, or pass comment on her wares.

“You blush,” Grantaire says at last. 

“The light confuses you,” Enjolras says. “I am pale.”

“Constantly,” Grantaire agrees. “The pallor of too much study and too much thought and too little sleep; it’s a shame. You colour nicely. Or you did. You haven’t blushed for me in a while.”

They're silent for another few strides. “I blushed for you,” Enjolras says at last. “When I came to Richefeu’s, and found you playing dominoes in the smoking-room.”

A greater silence falls, despite the constant increase of cheerful noise and brilliant light. They seem to be always attended by a third. The Barrière du Maine walks with them. 

“Better,” Grantaire says softly. “Better. I wish you would be properly angry with me.”

Enjolras shrugs. “I have no anger to spare.”

“You eat anger. You breathe it. You sleep with it in your bed.” He takes a breath. “Play Cicero to my Catiline. Take me as someone who plays their game and plies their tongue in the war-service, and turn blow for blow.”

A demand to be taken seriously, put into clear words at last, backhanded like everything that mouth touches. A plea for a dressing-down, the respect that comes with the true cut of the lash and the bite of salt instead of fly-swats.

Enjolras’s work feeds on righteous anger, towards a serious object. He can’t take anything from that store for Grantaire: he doesn’t have it to give, the energy or the words. If he did, it would _still_ be wasted on Grantaire, who has proven that already -

He shakes his head. They're quiet again, but of course that can't last forever.

“I should be grateful, I suppose,” Grantaire says ungratefully. “I come back to your side cringing like a cur, waiting for the blow that never falls, and all you have to give me is kind restraint, and with it the knowledge that I am the dust beneath your boots.”

“Tonight you were a shield,” Enjolras says, giving that much.

“And tomorrow, dust again,” Grantaire says. “For all that, I will outlive you – where will you be when the summer ends?” He glances at the dark mass of the gardens, as though suggesting _under the grass,_ and this time Enjolras doesn’t even bother to shrug.

Soon, he thinks, I will not even remember that I imagined being held.

**Author's Note:**

> \- This was supposed to be a short thing about the costuming choices for Grantaire in the film, slotting in between the Barrière du Maine and the barricades, and then it bulged, so it may require some massive suspension of disbelief (or the Canon AU tag) to marry back into canon.
> 
> \- I couldn't make this fit in the text without being hopelessly over-explanatory, but when Grantaire suggests changing solipsism (Narcissus) for same-sex erotics (Hyacinth) he's also being insulting; the hyacinth is the Orleans symbol. Similarly, comparisons to a lily (the Bourbons, and the monarchy at large) are a massive slap in the face pretending to be a compliment.
> 
> \- I have a [tumblr](http://arrivisting.tumblr.com) now, and presently I might even use it more than spottily & ineptly. Come say hi &/or suggest things! I'm writing proposals and am torn between total preoccupation and total procrastination.


End file.
